Mocking the Adversity.

The question, “Whose idea was this?” is a theme I explore in the thru-hiking memoir, One Mountain After Another. It originated in the early days of adventuring with my oldest friend, Jimmy. It was a joke, a mocking mantra meant to relieve the tension from whatever miserable moment confronted us: a deeper than expected stream crossing, steep rock scrambles, a leaking tent, frozen water bottles, icy slopes, a fishing hook embedded deep in a finger, driving sleet, a portage trail flooded by a beaver dam, flipping the canoe in raging whitewater, critters getting into our food supply, each of us assuming the other brought the tent… the list goes on.

They weren’t truly dangerous situations, but some weren’t far from it. And all were moments that today might be considered “type II fun.” Just when things began to appear bleak, one of us would ask the other, “Whose idea was this?” before cracking up. It became our adventure mantra, helping us push through challenging situations. Years later, when I began adventuring on my own, I carried the mantra with me.

The Mantra Began to Mock Me

In 2022, I embarked on a post-retirement hike of Vermont’s Long Trail to honor a family legacy. My father hiked the Long Trail upon graduation from high school in 1937, and I planned to retrace his steps. But things didn’t go as planned. The adversity I faced was unexpected, severe, and relentless.

I was no longer able to laugh off challenges as I had in the past. My long-time mantra failed to lighten the moment. It was no longer a rhetorical question meant to acknowledge adversity and find a little motivation to keep going. It became all too real, a haunting mantra for the journey.

Whose idea was this?

I could easily ask the same question about writing a book. When I set out to hike the Long Trail, writing about it was an afterthought. It started with discovering my father’s trail diary. At less than a thousand words, it’s just a brief snapshot of his adventure. But the thought of comparing our journeys by writing my own account sounded like a great way to honor his legacy. I planned to carve out a little room on my personal website to share a brief story with family and friends.

Then I came across a call for bloggers from The Trek, a website that bills itself as All Things Long Distance Backpacking. Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and everything in between. So, I applied to be a blogger. To say that things snowballed from there would be a huge understatement. My modest writing project grew and became an integral part of the journey.

The book project began as a simple compilation of the stories from The Trek. The blog posts were contemporaneous trail updates drawn from my daily journal entries, capturing moments of humor, vulnerability, self-doubt, perseverance, and triumph. My original thought for a book was to compile the blog posts and do as little editing or rewriting as possible to retain the blog’s in-the-moment flavor.

But overall, it fell short. The writing was often hurried, sloppy, and superficial. It lacked the deeper threads of connection that appeared throughout my journey and a perspective that only comes with time and reflection. My forthcoming memoir, One Mountain After Another, captures a more complete story, one that had been hidden in the pages of my journal and the trove of photographs taken along the way. It retains some of the blog’s foundation while also acknowledging the role writing played in the journey. Although I look back on some of the events in disbelief, the story is entirely true. As the saying goes, “You can’t make this shit up.”

The book title comes from a poignant line in my father’s journal describing his day trekking across the Monroe Skyline. His simple words were part of the legacy he left me. My journey turned out to be one mountain after another, some of them well-known peaks and others that didn’t appear on any map or chart. They rose up unexpectedly in my path, obstacles that often seemed insurmountable in the moment and my mantra often fell short.

I’m thankful that some of these stories found a home on The Trek and now here in this extended collection. I invite you to join me on this journey, a trail of words recounting a simple hike that turned into an unexpected odyssey.

Porkie,
End-to-Ender, Long Trail Class of 22/23